A Man's World. Edwards Albert

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      "Therefore man has no divine rule about what is good and bad. He must find out for himself. This experiment must be the aim of life – to find out what is good. I think that the best way to live would be so that the biggest number of people would be glad you did live."

      Such was my credo at eighteen. It has changed very little. I do not believe – in many things. My philosophy is still negative. And life seems to me now, as it did then, an experiment in ethics.

      My midnight walks by the mill-race were brought to an abrupt end. My speculations were interrupted by the doctor's heavy hand falling on my shoulder.

      "What are you doing out of bed at this hour? Smoking?"

      I was utterly confused, seeing no outlet but disgrace. My very fright saved me. I could not collect my wits to lie.

      "Thinking about God," I said.

      The doctor let out a long whistle and sat down beside me.

      "Was that what gave you brain fever?"

      "Yes."

      "Well – tell me about it."

      No good thing which has come to me since can compare with what the doctor did for me that night. For the first time in my life an adult talked with me seriously, let me talk. Grown-ups had talked to and at me without end. I had been told what I ought to believe. He was the first to ask me what I believed. It was perhaps the great love for him, which sprang up in my heart that night, which has made me in later life especially interested in such as he.

      I began at the beginning, and when I got to "Salvation" Milton, he interrupted me.

      "We're smashing rules so badly to-night, we might as well do more. I'm going to smoke. Want a cigar?"

      I did not smoke in those days. But the offer of that cigar, his treating me like an adult and equal, gave me a new pride in life, gave me courage to go through with my story, to tell about Oliver and Mary, to tell him of my credo. He sat there smoking silently and heard me through.

      "What do you think?" I asked at last, "Do you believe in God?"

      "I don't know. I never happened to meet him in any laboratory. It sounds to me like a fairy story."

      "Then you're an atheist," I said eagerly.

      "No. A skeptic." And he explained the difference.

      "How do you know what's good and what's bad?"

      "I don't know," he replied. "I only know that some things are comfortable and some aren't. It is uncomfortable to have people think you are a liar, especially so when you happen to be telling the truth. It is uncomfortable to be caught stealing. But I know some thieves who are uncaught and who seem quite comfortable. Above all it's uncomfortable to know you are a failure."

      His voice trailed off wearily. It was several minutes before he began again.

      "I couldn't tell you what's right and what's wrong – even if I knew. You don't believe in God, why should you believe in me? If you don't believe the Bible you mustn't believe any book. No – that's not what I mean. A lot of the Bible is true. Some of it we don't believe, you and I. So with the other books – part true, part false. Don't trust all of any book or any man."

      "How can I know which part to believe?"

      "You'd be the wisest man in all the world, my boy, if you knew that," he laughed.

      Then after a long silence, he spoke in a cold hard voice.

      "Listen to me. I'm not a good man to trust. I'm a failure."

      He told me the pitiful story of his life, told it in an even, impersonal tone as though it were the history of someone else. He had studied in Germany, had come back to New York, a brilliant surgeon, the head of a large hospital.

      "I was close to the top. There wasn't a man anywhere near my age above me. Then the smash. It was a woman. You can't tell what's right and wrong in these things. Don't blame that cousin of yours or the girl. If anybody ought to know it's a doctor. I didn't. It's the hardest problem there is in ethics. The theological seminaries don't help. It's stupid just to tell men to keep away from it – sooner or later they don't. And nobody can tell them what's right. You wouldn't understand my case if I told you about it. It finished me. I began to drink. Watch out for the drink. That's sure to be uncomfortable. I was a drunkard – on the bottom. At last I heard about her again. She was coming down fast – towards the bottom. Well, I knew what the bottom was like – and I did not want her to know."

      He smoked his cigar furiously for a moment before he went on. He had crawled out and sobered up. This school work and the village practice gave him enough to keep her in a private hospital. She had consumption.

      "And sometime – before very long," he ended, "she will die and – well – I can go back to Forgetting-Land."

      Of course I did not understand half what it meant. How I racked my heart for some word of comfort! I wanted to ask him to stay in the school and help other boys as he was helping me. But I could not find phrases. At last his cigar burned out and he snapped the stub into the mill-race. There was a sharp hiss, which sounded like a protest, before it sank under the water. He jumped up.

      "You ought to be in bed. A youngster needs sleep. Don't worry your head about God. It's more important for you to make the baseball team. Run along."

      I had only gone a few steps when he called me back.

      "You know – if you should tell anyone, I might lose my position. I don't care for myself – but be careful on her account. Goodnight."

      He turned away before I could protest. His calling me back is the one cloud on my memory of him. His secret was safe.

      For the rest of the school year I gave my undivided attention to baseball. The doctor was uniformly gruff to me. We did not have another talk.

      Two weeks before the school closed he disappeared. I knew that she had died, he would not have deserted his post while her need lasted. On Commencement Day, John, the apple-man, handed me a letter from him. I tore it up carefully after reading it, as he asked – threw the fragments out of the window of the train which was carrying me homeward. There was much to help me to clear thinking in that letter, but the most important part was advice about how to act towards the Father. "Don't tell him your doubts now. It would only distress him. Wait till you're grown up before you quarrel with him."

      II

      Nothing of moment happened in the weeks I spent in camp meeting that summer. Luckily Mary was not there and Oliver, having finished the Seminary, was passing some months in Europe. I bore in mind the Doctor's advice, avoided all arguments and mechanically observed the forms of that religious community. No one suspected my godlessness, but I suspected everyone of hypocrisy. It was a barren time of deceit.

      Even my correspondence with Margot gave me no pleasure. I could not write to her about my doubts, but I wanted very much to talk them over with her. While I could not put down on paper what was uppermost in my heart, I found it very hard to fill letters with less important things. Whenever I have been less than frank, I have always found it dolefully unsatisfactory.

      I imagine that most thoughtful boys of my generation were horribly alone. It is getting more the custom nowadays for adults to be friends with children. The Doctor at school was the only man in whom I had ever confided. And in my loneliness СКАЧАТЬ